This study examines the impact of mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on bank loan contractual terms. Our sample covers more than 20,000 bank loans for borrowers from 23 countries that mandate IFRS adoption and 16 countries that do not mandate IFRS adoption...

In a model of dual agency problems where borrower-lenders and bank-nonbank incentives may conflict, we predict a hockey stick relation between bank skin in the game and covenant tightness. As bank participation declines covenant tightness increases until reaching a low threshold, at which point...

This paper provides a more direct test of the superior information hypothesis of banks and informs a long standing policy debate about whether banks serve a special information role in the economy. I circumvent the self-selection bias that contaminated prior studies by obtaining bank loan...

Recent years have seen a new trend in commercial bank lending—loans with no financial covenants. These covenant light, or cov-lite, loans raise concerns about excessive risk to lenders due to lack of monitoring. In this study, we examine the consequences of cov-lite loans. Focusing on rated,...

Prior to 2018, accounting rules required banks that recognize financial liabilities at fair value to record unrealized gains and losses on the liabilities attributable to changes in the banks' own credit risk, referred to as the debt valuation adjustment (DVA), in earnings each period. Using a...

Recent evidence suggests that investors struggle to process complex financial disclosures. Relative to equity and public debt investors, banks have unique advantages in acquiring information and can impose contractual terms to mitigate information frictions. We investigate whether financial...

We analyze whether the disaggregation quality (DQ) of a borrower's financial statement is associated with its bank loan pricing. We find that firms with low DQ have high bank loan spreads and total cost of borrowing. These results are more pronounced for risky and poorly governed firms....

We examine whether syndicated loans securitized through Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) have more standardized financial covenants. We proxy for the standardization of covenants using the textual similarity of their contractual definitions. We find that securitized loans are associated...

We find that bond issuers receive bank loans with 11% fewer covenants when the secondary corporate bond market becomes more transparent. The treatment effect is more pronounced when the stock prices are less informative and when the debt-equity agency conflicts are more severe. The evidence...

How do different types of debt influence firm credit risk? This paper sheds new light on this issue by decomposing the leverage ratio into market debt, bank debt, and trade credit leverage ratios by balance sheet account type classification; and short-term debt and long-term debt leverage ratios...